This article was originally published by Untold Stories: Dispatches from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Mumbai—We arrived on Wednesday, Nov. 11, in Mumbai, formerly Bombay and India’s financial capital, on the Asian leg of Project Patchwork, our year-long quest for examples of multicultural societies where people of different creeds seemingly live together peacefully. Why Mumbai? One may well ask: a year ago, ten young Pakistani gunmen glided unseen into this great port and in a three-day rampage slaughtered at least 170 Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Jews, purportedly in the name of Islam. And we arrived on the eve of the first anniversary of the November 26-29 bloodbath.
Yet we quickly learned that there is little new Hindu-Muslim tension. “Most people see the killings as an act of foreign aggression,” we were told by Naresh Fernandes, editor-in-chief of Time Out Mumbai and editorial board member of World Policy Journal. “Things have been calm locally during the last four or five years, and the real dispute nowadays is about linguistic nativism.” He was referring to a bizarre controversy over the politically and legally correct language to be used by an elected lawmaker in taking his or her oath of office.
Most native-born Mumbaikars speak Marathi, and a calculated storm arose in the city’s legislative assembly when an incoming opposition lawmaker from neighboring Uttar Pradesh took his oath in Hindi, India’s most widely spoken language. [Watch a video on the controversy here.] For this offense, he was roughed up by Marathi-only militants linked to a fundamentalist Hindu party, the MNS (Maharashtra Navnirman Sena) led by Raj Thackeray, who regards migrant workers from other Indian states as hostile aliens. The subtext for language is jobs. The MNS first targeted polyglot Tamils, then Muslims, and currently northern newcomers. As the furor mounted, Thackeray tellingly upped the ante by demanding that in Mumbai all job seekers at the State Bank of India (SBI) had to be fluent in Marathi. And this just as the SBI says it needs 20,000 new clerical employees.
For Thackeray and his linguistic police, it matters not that India now recognizes 22 languages, and that one has a constitutional right to take his legislative oath in the official language Hindi. Nor does it matter that Thackeray’s own daughter studies in an English-language school, and that eight of his thirteen party members in the assembly also send their offspring to English-medium schools and colleges. The point is to churn up a furor over everything and anything that might offend a Marathi-speaking Hindu.
When a popular film, “Wake Up Sid,” erred by referring to “Bombay,” (a fundamentalist government had renamed it Mumbai in 1995) an apology appeared on multiple frames of the film in order to get it released. Textbooks appear in which history is conjured to suggest that only Hindus were indigenous, all other creeds being alien invaders. This process, as the astute critic of communal politics Ram Puniyani informed us, is called “saffronization,” since saffron is the Hindu’s sacred color.
All this in a sprawling metropolis undergoing a surge in population, which now tops 18 million, making it a mega-city with mega-problems. Quality of life has plunged by practically every measure: crime, health, schools, housing, transport, drugs, pollution, sewage, and undrinkable water. While weaving through the suffocating traffic in the central Mumbai, we saw a sign pointing to the judicial chambers of a “Court of Small Causes.” How better to describe one’s impression of the local political scene.
Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac are authors of twelve books and many articles. Their most recent book, Kingmakers, completes their trilogy on the theme of empire. Meyer is editor-at-large at World Policy Journal.